The brief was on Jim Calloway’s desk at 7:40 on a Tuesday morning, which was the first thing wrong with it. First-years delivered at midnight, or at six with an apology in the email, or at the deadline with DRAFT still stamped across the cover. Jenna Marsh had left hers squared on his blotter under a yellow sticky note: Opp. to MSJ, Delacroix v. Halvern Logistics. Ready for your comments.
He uncapped the red pen.
Forty-one floors down, Broad Street was filling with cabs. Jim read the way he had read since 1985, looking for the page where the associate stopped understanding the case and started hoping. It usually came around page six. A string cite padded with two cases from the wrong circuit. A parenthetical lifted off a headnote. A see where a cf. belonged. Once, a Second Circuit opinion cited for the opposite of its holding, by a kid who now sat on the bench in Delaware.
Page six came and went. So did nine. On eleven he found a sentence he would have built differently, read it twice, and decided hers was better. The pen hovered over the margin and came away clean.
By ten he had pulled a dozen volumes of F.3d off the shelves behind his desk, the bound reporters the firm still kept for partners who distrusted screens. Every pincite landed on the page it claimed. Every quotation matched down to the comma. The record cites pointed to deposition lines that said what the brief said they said. He had read about the lawyers in this very district who filed a chatbot’s homework and got sanctioned when half the cases turned out to be invented. These cases existed. They lay open on the carpet around his chair like a dropped deck of cards.
In forty years, the only paperwork that had ever come back to Jim this clean had been his expense reports, after the third floor reconciled them to the penny.
He set the pen on the blotter without capping it and watched the felt tip go dull. Then he picked up the phone.
Jenna stopped just inside the door. She had been at the firm since August, and she still hadn’t taken the chair across from his desk once.
“Sit,” Jim said.
“I’m all right here.”
He held up the brief. “Who looked at this?”
“You’re the first partner to see it.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Her eyes went to the reporters on the floor, then back to him. “I had it proofread.”
“By Pruitt?” Deborah Pruitt ran appellate and wrote like a scalpel. She also refused, on principle, to help first-years with anything.
“No.”
“Okafor, then. I saw you two at the elevator last week.”
“Mr. Okafor’s been in Singapore since the ninth.”
Jim stood, which he did rarely before lunch. He crossed the room and held the brief open to page twenty-two in front of her. “You distinguish Kessler on the indemnity clause. I argued Kessler. In 1998. The panel didn’t understand it, opposing counsel didn’t understand it, and on most days I don’t understand it. You’ve explained it in four sentences.”
“It’s a confusing opinion.”
“Who explained it to you?”
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “I used the resources the firm provides.”
“The library.”
“Partly.”
“Partly what?”
“There’s a tool.” She said it to the window. “It’s on the approved list. IT sent a memo about it in June. There was a training.”
“I don’t read IT memos.”
“Most of the partners don’t.” She swallowed. “It helped me organize the argument. I checked every citation myself, against the reporters. Twice.”
“I checked them too. They’re right.” He heard his own voice climbing and didn’t stop it. “They’re all right, Jenna. In forty years I have never once read a first-year brief where they were all right. So somebody in this building sat down with you, and I would like to know who, because I want them on Delacroix and I want them on everything else I have.”
The room was quiet enough to hear the HVAC. Jenna looked at the chair she had been refusing since August, pulled it out, and sat down in it.
“Claude,” she said.
Jim looked at the brief, at the reporters splayed across his carpet, at the red pen gone dry on the blotter. He reached for it and capped it.
“Claude,” he said. “From Accounting?”